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Show HN: Emoji to Scale
- _han 5y agoWould be interesting to see this in a (log scaled?) histogram. Probably a lot of things in the 1 metre order of magnitude.
- bko 5y ago12m Cactus I thought this was a mistake but it checks out. https://www.dimensions.com/collection/cactus-cacti https://www.dimensions.com/collection/cactus-cacti
- thom 5y agoSlightly tangential to the author's intent, but is there any way in modern web front ends to discover accurate DPI info of the screen you're on, and therefore at least attempt to create correct physical sizes for UI elements?
- rigrassm 5y agoI want to know why the Astrodome has a soccer field instead of baseball and more importantly, no dome! They even have 6 flags on the stadium ( which I'm assuming is a reference to Six Flags over Texas, could be wrong though) but no baseball field?!? Weekend ruined! Awesome project OP!
- qwerty456127 5y agoThe fact we still are using bitmap icons seems really weird to me by the way. We should have switched to SVG as soon as screen resolutions and DPIs (e.g. on handheld devices) started growing.
- leodriesch 5y agoI’m honestly impressed by how detailed most of the emojis are (on iOS at least), even though they’re mostly just shown at tiny sizes. Nice attention to detail.
- reginold 5y agoThis is fun! What is the biggest size jump in this database by percentage growth between one emoji and the next?
- reginold 5y agoMy guess is Mt Fuji (8 km) to map of Japan (1527 km). Curiously, a map is not this size, Japan is. A map is closer to 1m.
- javierbyte 5y agoVisualize emojis to scale. The chicken is not bigger than the car anymore!
- dwohnitmok 5y agoI was half-expecting there to be a gigantic jump to the sun emoji and then the galaxy emoji, but that might have presented rather interesting engineering challenges at that point.
- Scaevolus 5y agoCute! Using SVG to render the emoji might make this look even better, see https://smilecraft.net/emoji.html https://smilecraft.net/emoji.html for a simple example.
- catern 5y agoI love the idea, but the algorithm for scaling seems a bit off. For example, it shows the human as much larger than the car.
- irrational 5y agoMaybe it’s one of those tiny Smart Cars.
- tracedddd 5y agoI think it’s by height in which case it makes sense… maybe.
- hanniabu 5y agoSome seem by height and some by width, and some make no sense at all.
- orliesaurus 5y agoIs it rendering the Emojis using the local emoji set so for example if I'm on an Android phone I will see the Android emojis and if I'm on an iPhone I will see the iPhone emojis?
- javierbyte 5y agoYes! Author here, the emojis text with css transforms.
- lopis 5y agoUnfortunately the side effect is that some emojis, live the gorilla, are only a head in my font. Still, it's cute, despite the weird scales (your mouth is 12cm??)
- valleyer 5y agoNeat concept. As someone not very up-to-date in Web UI techniques, I was curious as to how the array was being advanced on scroll. Unfortunately, it looks like the answer is basically polling. The code constantly calls window.requestAnimationFrame(), checking window.pageYOffset. This means that the page is constantly doing work, even at idle. Surely the more correct way is to install an onscroll handler or something, right?
- have_faith 5y agoRequest animation frame exists specifically to avoid ‘traditional’ polling. You’re thinking more of setInterval() which is the old way of doing it. The requestAnimationFrame docs are a good read, there are lots of performance benefits.
- vincentriemer 5y agoThe correct way would be a mix of those two strategies: an onscroll handler that schedules an update through requestAnimationFrame (ensuring that it only gets scheduled once until the next frame update actually executes).
- goatherders 5y agoThe correct way is the way that works, which this does.
- osrec 5y agoWell, perhaps, but it's unnecessarily inefficient.
- tekromancr 5y agoI mean, it's inefficient as for the 120 seconds you play with it. I don't think it's worth spending more time trying to perfect something like this.
- framecowbird 5y ago
- authed 5y agoI didn't know that we could get a 5.5cm credit card...
- fastball 5y agoEverything is by height. V2 should try everything by mass.
- ushakov 5y agonever knew i needed this until i tried
- mdoms 5y agoGreat idea! Why vertical scrolling though?
- gungsukma2 5y agoShould have "banana for scale" checkbox
- trissylegs 5y agoOk on my emoji set the Gorilla (Silverback) is just it's head. So it seems to imply a Gorilla has a head the size of a Llama.
- is-is-odd 5y agoShould put an eggplant at the end :)
- noduerme 5y agowhy couldn't this be done with SVG?
- revskill 5y agoThe popularity of Emoji to me is not good for communication. Instead of careful and clarity in writing, people choose Emoji to respond to what needs to be more clarified. So, if it's hard to express your thought, let's pick an Emoji!? At work, this leads to more trouble in writing. Most of JIRA tickets are mostly non-existent that it's badly written, confusing to the developers and rest of the team. Emoji might be just one reason for that. But anyway, it just shows the trouble on how people have problem in writing communication. Do people overuse Emoji ? I don't think this is about overuse or not, it's about people failed at expressing their thought through writing.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoEmojis are fast, easy and universally understood, especially across language barriers. Not all responses between humans need to be written in prose. Using images has been and will continue to be a significant way for humans to communicate with.
- revskill 5y agoYou missed the point here. Instead of a clear explanation in written form, people think an emoji is enough, which is a problem. As the author doesn't want to know how other 're feeling , they want to know their thoughts instead.
- hoten 5y agoPerhaps they missed whatever point you were making, but your comment is largely offtopic.
- skipnup 5y agoPeople also use gestures and facial expressions while talking (see Italy for a frequently portrayed nation for this), why not use the next best thing in (non-formal) communication?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tshaddox 5y agoThey missed this at the end: https://emojipedia.org/milky-way/ https://emojipedia.org/milky-way/
- joe5150 5y agoand this at the other end: https://emojipedia.org/microbe/ https://emojipedia.org/microbe/
- tshaddox 5y agoNot quite at the end. https://emojipedia.org/atom-symbol/ https://emojipedia.org/atom-symbol/
- joshxyz 5y agoAh the ReactJS emoji!
- colejohnson66 5y agoSo, is the emoji “tiny” like an atom, or “huge” like React?
- tshaddox 5y agoReact is like 35 KB gzipped. Pretty huge in terms of JavaScript bundle size, but still physically very very small!
- colejohnson66 5y agoOh, for sure. React is pretty small on its own. It's when the whole site is bundled into an SPA that's over 1 MB is it an issue. I wasn't making a jab at React so much as a jab at people using React (IMO) irresponsibly.
- joe5150 5y ago
- toqy 5y agoReminds me of an old favorite https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....
- mvexel 5y agoThat, and OP, reminded me of the Eames "Powers of 10" film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
- aasasd 5y agoA better way to enjoy that is with a soundtrack by Gas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvG-jqGsWSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvG-jqGsWSk
- k_sze 5y agoHow is a goat 45 cm?
- pjerem 5y agoWhat a badass 12m cactus !
- joe5150 5y agothe emoji is usually depicted as a saguaro, which can easily be that tall!
- travisgriggs 5y agoWhy is the mermaid so huge? The flamingo dancer and running male are smaller. The mermaid is apparently an Amazonian Mermaid, able to hurl the bison next to her to the ground with a flick of her tail.
- folli 5y agoTwo meter mermaid incl. the tail seems reasonable to me, however I have never met one in person.
- mattowen_uk 5y agoEither way, a two metre Amazonian mermaid is kinda hot.
- whiskyant 5y ago4-leaf clover larger than a credit card?
- croisillon 5y agodon't get it either
- whylo 5y agoMeasured from the base of the stalk, maybe? Rather than the diameter of the leaves
- moss2 5y agoI didn't know goats were so tiny (45 cm)
- can16358p 5y agoThat's the new M1 Goat Mini.
- boondaburrah 5y agoHoly shit that's a really big clover
- Thorrez 5y agoThe mosquito looks too small compared to the ant. I guess both can vary in size, but mosquitos I've seen have been larger than ants I've seen. Here's a video with a mosquito and an ant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW_RUnjLv6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW_RUnjLv6c
- traes 5y agoLikely just a regional thing. Ants where I live tend to be slightly larger than our mosquitos, and they certainly have far more volume.
- onion2k 5y agoAnts where I live tend to be far larger than our mosquitos. When you say "far larger", is that twice as big? 10 times bigger? 1000 times bigger? I might have to avoid where you live.
- vultour 5y agoThe ladybug one must be way off, where do they have 1cm large ladybugs? That sounds terrifying. I'd say our mosquitos are closer to 1cm, although they're long but thin. There's more of these which are really weird, like the 12m cactus.
- scatters 5y agoIt's probably a seven-spot ladybird; those average about 10mm. I can assure you that they aren't terrifying at all.
- rosetremiere 5y agoIs japan the only country that has its own map as a unicode symbol? If so, is there a story behind it? I would bet on compatibility with some regional encoding that had it to begin with.
- wodenokoto 5y agoEmoji was basically created to add graphics to Japanese mobile websites in the late nineties when people paid by the byte. Back then the supplier of the websites also made the phones, and you could only access specific mobile webs depending on your carrier. The original emoji were mostly create to facilitate online shopping for train tickets for vacation and ringtones. So a lot of these represent travel, food and landmarks. Edit: this is for Japanese handsets and carriers. That was pretty unclear before the edit
- tinus_hn 5y agoThe original set of emoji was created by one Japanese person in a weekend for a Japanese mobile operator. So these images, like the blood types, the astrology signs and the cats and later the rice ball and the pile of poo are images Japanese people would want to use in their communication. The Wikipedia page of the creator has some links to the origin story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigetaka_Kurita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigetaka_Kurita
- createunderrate 5y agoEmoji were created in Japan.
- tempestn 5y agoThat was super fun. Best use of unconventional scrolling I've ever seen, I think.
- bagacrap 5y agolast I checked, the astrodome has, y'know, a dome on top. That's clearly an open air stadium.
- nephrite 5y agoSo the emojis go left to right, but you have to scroll frop top to bottom, strange decision.
- redconfetti 5y agoI really wish they put a woman emoji at the end, labelled "Your Mom"
- 1270018080 5y agoIt's really laggy by the time you get to Tokyo Tower. My computer is hot.
- schmorptron 5y agoHuh? I was about to comment the exact opposite, I was super impressed by how smooth it was! And that's running on a 3 year old low-end ryzen 3 laptop processor, on firefox in fedora.
- Gigachad 5y agoThis page was running at about 3fps on my M1 macbook.
- x3ro 5y agoThat's what I found too, in Firefox. I then switched to Safari and it was buttery smooth everywhere (MBP 16", not M1). Haven't tried in Chrome yet. I wonder why the performance varies so wildly...
- wartijn_ 5y agoFunny idea, but lot of these seem off. - A chicken egg is taller than 5cm. - I would say a tulip is bigger than a phone. - The okay hand sign says it's 21 cm.My hands are larger than average, but definitely smaller than 21cm. - A duck isn't bigger than a goat. - An elephant is smaller than a house.
- nkozyra 5y agoThe one that most confused me was lips bigger than the heart
- adzm 5y agoI think some measurements are widths and some are heights.
- fastball 5y agoI think they're actually all by height, and if you google them the OP actually matches up. e.g. googling "duck height": 20 – 30 in (51 – 76 cm) "goat height": 16 – 23 in (40 – 58 cm) Maybe it would be better to do them by mass.
- hanniabu 5y agoIs your mouth height 15cm/6in?
- d13 5y agoGoats average 75cm https://www.dimensions.com/element/goats https://www.dimensions.com/element/goats Ducks average 12cm https://targetstudy.com/nature/animals/duck.html https://targetstudy.com/nature/animals/duck.html
- Nition 5y agoA little unfortunate if they just used the automatic Google info results. The duck one is the Indian Runner duck - a Mallard would make more sense per the emoji.
- 5y ago
- AceJohnny2 5y agoWhat is the yellow smiley face that's twice as large as Japan but smaller than the earth and oh god I can see it in the sky it's look--
- AceJohnny2 5y agooh nm that's the moon
- tim-- 5y agoDefinitely had the same question, and the exact same realisation. We must be Android users!
- AceJohnny2 5y agoI wrote the first comment before I realized what it was. I thought it was a joke where the author intentionally mis-sized an object. Only after I submitted did it occur to me that the size could be similar to the moon's
- ljm 5y agoI'm tempted to submit the clownface emoji at twice the scale of the sun, in reference to both the large clown boss in Super Bomberman[0], and more loosely to Sinistar[1] [0]https://bomberman.fandom.com/wiki/Clown_Mask https://bomberman.fandom.com/wiki/Clown_Mask [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinistar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinistar
- spiderice 5y agoIt's the moon from Majora's Mask, clearly
- cunthorpe 5y agoGoat: 45cm Duck: 50cm Might as well say “shuffled emojis with random data attached”
- rob74 5y agoAlso, the "running man" being bigger than a cow and about the same size as a horse... But what really bugs me is that it simply uses some font it finds on your system, so on my slightly outdated Linux version it only shows about 70% of the emojis. I mean, if there was ever a perfect use case for webfonts, it would be this page...
- mminer237 5y agoThe average man is taller in height than the average cow and shorter in total height than the average horse. His cow is about the average total height of a cow at 160cm. He has an oddly short man though at 165cm / 5'5". And he says the horse is the same size, but that would be only 16 hands. That would be the withers size of an average horse, but the total height of only a pony.
- King-Aaron 5y agoArm: 30cm. I think my arm is bigger than that. And fire: 40cm. This seems somewhat arbitrary lol
- ocimbote 5y agoLet's play picky: In anatomy, the arm is the part between the elbow and the shoulder. Below the elbow is the forearm. With that in mind, 30cm for the arm is definitively a sound measure... and the name of the emoji is wrong. On every phone, keyboard and app. tl;dr; what is commonly called arm is in fact arm + forearm. Don't blame the author for being correct.
- wartijn_ 5y agoThe emoji isn't called "arm" though, it's "flexed biceps". Alternative names are: biceps | comic | flex | flexed biceps | muscle. [0] And every popular implementation shows arm + forearm + fist. [1] Giving only one part of that as the length is just wrong. Even if it were called arm, I would argue that that should be shoulder to wrist, since that's what commonly called an arm. It's also the definition that Merriam Webster has. [2] [0] https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-list.html#1f4aa https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-list.html#1f4aa [1] https://emojipedia.org/flexed-biceps/ https://emojipedia.org/flexed-biceps/ [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arm https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arm
- 0x456 5y agoSome of these don't show up for me (like Saturn). This might work better with a web-font? Although then you'd lose the harmonious platform emojis. I wonder if there's a way to check if a unicode character exists in a font and dynamically substitute, without using canvas.
- can16358p 5y agoQuick and dirty idea: maybe try rendering it to an offscreen span/div, get its size and compare it to a well known size of what gets substituted for a generic symbol if it doesn't exist, and if the size matches that, replace with something else.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- phailhaus 5y agoProjects like this remind me why I love the web. So cute! This is an open source project, so everyone commenting with suggestions can just open up a PR: https://github.com/javierbyte/emoji-to-scale https://github.com/javierbyte/emoji-to-scale
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fagnerbrack 5y agoCan someone please tell me why I was hypnotised by this? Do you think this ethical to do to another human being looking for a productive afternoon!???!?!?! /s
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoThe other day I was running a web version of Townscapes on my smartphone, and it worked beautifully and smooth. But this one is so laggy and slow that I barely could scroll to Laptop (24cm), and then just stopped. How come a real-time 3D rendering is faster then just displaying a few 2D pictures side by side on a screen? Tech these days is weird.
- tobyjsullivan 5y agoI had the opposite experience with both of those. Can’t run townscapes beyond the first frame render, but this site is perfectly smooth on iOS.
- mattigames 5y agoBecause the page is mutating the CSS "left" property which is known to be extremely slow (should have used translate), and also creating/removing the dom elements, which is also slow. That Townscapes you saw was probably running over WebGL, you can use 2D over WebGL for the speed benefits with libraries like PixiJS (or from scratch but that's not recommended)
- bmicraft 5y agoIt seems to run with native framerate in firefox while chromium gets maybe 20fps on my laptop
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fnord77 5y agothat was fun :)
- deepstack 5y agoOh my Emoji feel like Chinese writing system!
- franga2000 5y agoCool idea, but since one one dimension (height?) was considered, you get some weird things like a cactus (12m) being way bigger than a house (7m).
- rob74 5y agoAccording to Wikipedia, Saguaro cacti "can grow to be over 12 meters (40 feet) tall". So, a real old and real huge Saguaro can be bigger than your average house (or palm tree): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro#/media/File:Saguaro_with_many_arms.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saguaro#/media/File:Saguaro_wi.... But I would say 99% of them aren't...
- franga2000 5y agoOh yeah, I looked it up too and was really surprised, being from Cetral Europe and having never seen a cactus outside of a pot before :)
- duiker101 5y agoNot to mention the bigger than the Hippopotamus :D Very cool project tho!
- duiker101 5y agoI meant to say the woman, forgot the word :D
- wongarsu 5y agoEven more confusingly, it's not consistent about the measured dimension. The car is 1.8m (wide), the firetruck is 2.3m (wide), the tractor is 5m (long), the bus is 12m (long), the statue of liberty is 46m (high), the astrodome is 66m (high). It would have made more sense to stay with either height or the largest dimension (but that would have been weird for mountains, which often are far wider than high).